- Poster presentation
- Open access
- Published:
Effect of rivastigmine as an adjunct to usual care with haloperidol on duration of delirium and mortality in critically ill patients: a multicentre, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomised trial
Critical Care volume 15, Article number: P339 (2011)
Introduction
Delirium is frequently diagnosed in critically ill patients and is associated with adverse outcome. Impaired cholinergic neurotransmission seems to have an important role in the development of delirium. We aimed to establish the effect of the cholinesterase inhibitor rivastigmine on the duration of delirium in critically ill patients.
Methods
Patients (aged ≥18 years) who were diagnosed with delirium were enrolled from six ICUs in the Netherlands, and treated between November 2008 and January 2010. Patients were randomised (1:1 ratio) to receive an increasing dose of rivastigmine or placebo, starting at 0.75 ml (1.5 mg rivastigmine) twice daily and increasing in increments to 3 ml (6 mg rivastigmine) twice daily from day 10 onwards, as an adjunct to usual care based on haloperidol. The trial pharmacist generated the randomisation sequence by computer, and consecutively numbered bottles of the study drug according to this sequence to conceal allocation. The primary outcome was the duration of delirium during hospital admission. Analysis was by intention to treat. Duration of delirium was censored for patients who died or were discharged from hospital while delirious. Patients, medical staff, and investigators were masked to treatment allocation. Members of the data safety and monitoring board (DSMB) were unmasked and did interim analyses every 3 months.
Results
Although a sample size of 440 patients was planned, after inclusion of 104 patients with delirium who were eligible for the intention-to-treat analysis (n = 54 on rivastigmine, n = 50 on placebo), the DSMB recommended that the trial be halted because mortality in the rivastigmine group (n = 12, 22%) was higher than in the placebo group (n = 4, 8%; P = 0.07). Median duration of delirium was longer in the rivastigmine group (5.0 days, IQR 2.7 to 14.2) than in the placebo group (3.0 days, IQR 1.0 to 9.3; P = 0.06).
Conclusions
Rivastigmine did not decrease duration of delirium and might have increased mortality so we do not recommend use of rivastigmine to treat delirium in critically ill patients.
Acknowledgements
This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00704301. Funded by ZonMw, the Netherlands Brain Foundation, and Novartis.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Van Eijk, M., Roes, K., Honing, M. et al. Effect of rivastigmine as an adjunct to usual care with haloperidol on duration of delirium and mortality in critically ill patients: a multicentre, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomised trial. Crit Care 15 (Suppl 1), P339 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc9759
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/cc9759